Marble Madness

Q1. So my check ride was a great success! Two lady B-52H offenders=excellent bombs on target, on time. It was the second or third time I had the same evaluator (who was also on my deployed crew in Guam last year). For my (hopefully) last check ride in Shreveport, Louisiana next year, he may in fact be my evaluator again. Who knows? And, in a couple weeks I will be dropping 27xMk-82 inerts (cement bombs with fins) from the bomb bay. Suhweet.

The only thing I’m not looking forward to is Tetris-ing that ladder around the weapons. Now, Mk-82s are better than Mk-117s in that regard; those guys are super fat and take up ALL the space in the bomb bay. It’s like playing a super expensive, high-stakes game of Operation, that stressful childhood game that would buzz every time you touched the metal parts with the tweezers? Don’t touch the jet or bombs with the ladder, much like Rage Kage and Jables illustrate beautifully in this accurate video. JB is the Radar Navigator, and KG is the bewildered Navigator. Do take notice how JB skillfully shows how one would contort their body to accomplish a bay weapons pre-flight.

“What are you gonna do?”
“I’m goin’ in there and gettin’ those pins.”

Did I mention the ladder is one of those jacked up “Lil Giant” adjustable ladders that pinch your skin off in sizable chunks and can collapse while you’re using it if you don’t click everything into place correctly? Really, what could go wrong?

“Can’t.. reach… pin.”

Oh yeah, and I got squadron Volunteer of the Quarter, Apr – Jun 2013. It’s hard to explain, that I don’t particularly do things with my spare time to make the Air Force happy. If I am cruising along with my life and I can “count it for something,” I might as well. Personally, I loathe the Air Force award program and think they are political and silly. I applied for an award on only one other occasion: Navigator of the Quarter, 2011. I worked my butt off with Weapons School guys for three weeks at Red Flag Alaska while all the other Lieutenants played frisbee so our bombers would have relevant missions to fly for training. No recognition, okay, no problem. But they gave the award to some dick who was applying for pilot training and needed to pad his resume. Anyway, it’s funny to see the only award I’ve received as non-job related. We can see where my talents lie… hanging out with awesome elderly people.

DOES NOT COMPUTE. Here is an excerpt from an excellent post I stumbled across linked on Reddit. Even having a small amount of IT knowledge should be standard for computer users. Yes, I use an Apple computer, but I worked with the nuts and bolts of PCs from age 7-18. Yes, I’ve become awfully lazy with an Apple; any tinkering I do these is front-end. Larry has encouraged me to build a gaming PC, and I just might to dust out the cobwebs… especially with the Morrowind Overhaul mod, and Skyblivion coming out in the near future. I look at it this way: I’m dreading buying a PS4, and I’ll be damned if I plunk down my hard-earned cash for an XBone with built-in spying feature. Anyway, as you can see, 97% of the population are front-end users; most of those are fluffy front-end users: they can use an internet browser. Wow, good for you.

Not really knowing how to use a computer is deemed acceptable if you’re twenty-five or over. It’s something that some people are even perversely proud of, but the prevailing wisdom is that all under eighteens are technical wizards, and this is simply not true. They can use some software, particularly web-apps. They know how to use Facebook and Twitter. They can use YouTube and Pinterest. They even know how to use Word and PowerPoint and Excel. Ask them to reinstall an operating system and they’re lost. Ask them to upgrade their hard-drive or their RAM and they break out in a cold sweat. Ask them what https means and why it is important and they’ll look at you as if you’re speaking Klingon.

They click ‘OK’ in dialogue boxes without reading the message. They choose passwords like qwerty1234. They shut-down by holding in the power button until the monitor goes black. They’ll leave themselves logged in on a computer and walk out of the room. If a program is unresponsive, they’ll click the same button repeatedly until it crashes altogether.

How the hell did we get to this situation? How can a generation with access to so much technology, not know how to use it?

TILE, DARN YA, TILE. As promised, here are before and after photos of my bathroom. I’m working on the kitchen cabinets currently. Two people from work have come to look at the house, so hopefully more will follow. I’d like to sell it to someone in the squadron so that we don’t have to fork over ungodly amounts of money to a realtor to essentially do nothing. This place is so cute it’ll sell itself. So, the bathroom was renovated. I peeled two layers of wallpaper and painted the walls. Larry ripped up two layers of laminate flooring, plywood underlayment, and scraped off another gold sparkly layer of laminate. The floor was tiled with black and white, and the walls were tiled with white subway tile. Who wallpapers a bathroom with maroon paper? Really?